The Batten Institute at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business improves the world through entrepreneurship and innovation. The Institute's academic research center advances knowledge that addresses real-world challenges and shapes Darden's curriculum, and the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership offers one of the world's top entrepreneurship programs. The Batten Institute was established with gifts now totaling over $100 million from U.Va. alumnus the late Frank Batten, Sr., a media pioneer, visionary, and founder of The Weather Channel. www.batteninstitute.org.

11/28/2012 @ 10:41AM3,683 views

How To Innovate - Without A Miracle

Innovation is something we know we all need desperately – our country needs it, our companies need it, our communities need it. We are staring a whole host of decidedly wicked problems in the eyeballs – in health care, in social security, in energy, in national competitiveness – and the wicked problems are clearly winning. In the slinging of insults and inanities that seemed to characterize this election season, it is hard not see ourselves as fiddling while Rome burns.

We talk about innovation, we fervently wish for it, and we wait for miracles – for Moses to part the waters. In business, in particular (I work in a business school) we are big on demanding innovation. We put it in mission statements and into performance assessments. Every company waits for its own iPod, pad or phone – the little i’s that revolutionize our industry. And mostly we wait for our own Steve Jobs, our Moses, to part the waters for us as we stand on the banks of today’s reality looking at a new and better future just on the other side of the river. Add genius and stir – our formula. Innovation as a natural act.

Let’s talk about that 1% – the Steve Jobs and the Moses – and what the other 99% of us are supposed to do while we wait for them to show up. Probably invent a new app – that seems to be the increasingly the definition of innovation in my world (a personal pet peeve of mine).

Maybe instead of waiting for someone to part the waters for us, the other 99% of us need to get real and start building some bridges. Treat innovation, like a bridge, as an outcome – an outcome that takes effort and expertise and the right materials. What if we took innovation seriously as outcome and paid attention to the kind of expertise and effort – the kind of new behaviors we need to learn – and maybe even taught them in our schools?

The good news is that somebody already has – in design schools. The bad news is that they are teaching them only to a small group of people who see themselves as formal “designers.” But what if we all saw ourselves as designers of a sort, saw ourselves as capable of building bridges that take us safely and reliably from today to a better tomorrow? All by ourselves, without Moses to part the waters for us?

At the business school I teach at – as well as at others – we are doing just that. We are studying and incorporating design thinking as an important part of our curriculum. Not to replace the finance, accounting, marketing and operations skills necessary to run a successful business, but to complement them with the creative problem solving skills necessary to invent a new one.

This turns out to be both surprisingly easy and surprising hard at the same time. The positive part has to do with the design of the curriculum. Leaders in this area like the Stanford Design School in California, the Institute of Design in Chicago, Toronto’s Rotman School of Business and our own work at the University of Virginia’s Darden School, have begun to produce blueprints and materials to make the classroom piece work. In our own case, we have created a simple process that incorporates 4 key questions and 10 design tools to get MBAs and practicing managers comfortable with design thinking. The What is? question explores current reality. Its focus is discovery – uncovering the deep unmet needs of whatever stakeholder group we want to innovate for. It uses design tools like journey mapping to help us do that. It culminates in the creation of a set of data-driven design criteria that will guide our idea generating processes. The second question, What if? uses the design criteria from the first stage to generate a large number of ideas that we will turn into new concepts. It uses design tools like brainstorming to create “napkin pitches” that capture the user case for the new concepts we have generated. What wows? our third question, introduces the experimental dimension using tools like assumption testing and prototyping, core elements of design thinking. It helps us to narrow down our choices, and ends with the design of some small bets that allow us to address the fourth question, What works? by interacting in the real world with actual users through our small experiments.

The harder part turns out to be helping us old dogs – the business school faculty who grew up in a world only interested in analytical problem solving – some new tricks. For that, we believe that the solution is to create a community of educators to share their own teaching materials, successes and challenges with each other. We have created an online forum, Design@Darden, to create a home for that effort.

We are excited by the successes we are already seeing and by the response of the managers and MBAs we are working with. Because it turns out – even without Moses to part the waters for us – it feels pretty miraculous when innovation shows up.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

Design thinking is great, but it still falls short, i.e. it leaves too much to random brainstorming. Solving really tough important problems require hard work. Learning TRIZ is really hard work. If the general public wasn’t so afraid of some hard work and study, TRIZ would be used everywhere. TRIZ in conduction with Design Thinking would be awesome, but alas… it is not something that can be boiled down to templates and tools.

Innovations do not always need to be amazing new product designs. Often the most significant innovations are those that result from companies willing to listen to customers and fully leverage internal and external talents to provide creative new solutions that clients appreciate. For this to happen, organizations need to understand how collaborate seamlessly.